A Brief History of the Human Race, and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction.
Cook applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity, and reported the following:
That page will tell a reader about two aspects of the Arab empire ruled by the early Caliphs. One is the relative abandon with which the central government was able to hire and fire its provincial governors. The other is the momentous decision it made not to distribute land to the soldiers who had conquered it, but rather to leave it with the cultivators, tax them, and pay salaries to its soldiers.Learn more about A History of the Muslim World at the Princeton University Press website.
What the reader won’t learn from this page is that we see here a crucial divergence between the ex-Roman territory ruled by the Arab invaders in the Middle East and the ex-Roman territory ruled by the Germans in Western Europe. But the problems of exercising power at a distance in premodern times without benefit of instantaneous communications is a theme that runs through the book. Where the test fails is that the book has several other themes that happen not to show up on page 99.
The book is about the history of the Muslim world from the beginning to around 1800, but it’s bookended by a chapter at the start that backs up into late antiquity to set the scene for the rise of Islam, and a chapter at the end that builds a bridge between 1800 and the present day. The geographical scope extends from the west coast of Africa to the Pacific rim, but it ventures to the Americas to follow the fortunes of Morisca slaves in sixteenth-century Peru and the interplay of Islam and Catholicism in the childhood of the Argentinian president Carlos Menem. The author is a historian, not a public intellectual, so to the best of his ability he describes history as it was, not as a variety of people with present-day concerns might prefer to imagine it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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